Berenice Quotes

In France, it's always about life, normal life. We always stick with these realistic things. So when French people are dreaming about American movies, they go and see the thrillers, and Westerns, and science fiction, huge entertaining movies. ~ Berenice Bejo

There are many teachers who could ruin you. Before you know it you could be a pale copy of this teacher or that teacher. You have to evolve on your own. ~ Berenice Abbott

I never thought about how I didn't have a cell phone or I'm in 2011. I was just so happy to be able to be a character in the 30s and there are these actresses that I really liked in the 40s, 50s and 60s in American movies that I've seen since I was a little girl. But you don't really think like that when you prepare for a role. ~ Berenice Bejo

Ever since the movie premiered at Cannes, I've had a sudden surge of scripts and interest. ~ Berenice Bejo

For us, as actors, and even for the director, it gave us a sense of authenticity to what we were doing because we were talking about Hollywood and we were in Hollywood. ~ Berenice Bejo

I looked at a lot of photos from Hollywood in the '20s, photographs of silent movies being filmed all over the world which are very specific and very evocative. Berenice, the lead actress, is my wife. She really followed the same path with me. ~ Michel Hazanavicius

The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn, - not the material of my every-day existence
but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective. ~ Berenice Abbott

I guess I'm the perfect young lead actress. I'm not Chloe Sevigny - I'm not really a character actress. Some actors have "character" faces. ~ Berenice Bejo

I read Gloria Swanson's autobiography just because I wanted to know what it was like in the time. ~ Berenice Bejo

In the strange anomaly of my existence, feelings with me had never been of the heart, and my passions always were of the mind. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

From my words you will have reached the conclusion that the real Berenice is a temporal succession of different cities, alternately just and unjust. But what I wanted to warn you about is something else: all the future Berenices are already present in this instant, wrapped one within the other, confined, crammed, inextricable. ~ Italo Calvino

People recognize me, I have scripts, and auditions. And I meet great people. ~ Berenice Bejo

I'm not a nice girl. I'm a photographer. ~ Berenice Abbott

'Bond girl' is a bit abstract, what does that mean, you see a girl in a bikini? ~ Berenice Marlohe

The difference between the extras here and in France is the French extras read books. Actually, they hide the book and pretend that they're acting. Here, you can see everybody wants his break. ~ Berenice Bejo

Even in the very beginning when she would bump into George Valentine and people would start taking pictures of her, she never thought, 'I'm with George Valentine. I need to get a picture with him.' She's like 'oh that's funny. Everyone's taking pictures!' ~ Berenice Bejo

Abstraction in photography is ridiculous, and is only an imitation of painting. We stopped imitating painters a hundred years ago, so to imitate them in this day and age is laughable. ~ Berenice Abbott

The photographer is the contemporary being par excellence; through his eyes the now becomes the past. ~ Berenice Abbott

I think the approach of the character for us is the same in a silent movie as in a talking movie because we had balance, we had lines to learn. ~ Berenice Bejo

He paused, wishing to embrace her, but feeling for the moment that he should not. Then, reaching into a waistcoat pocket, he took from it a thin gold locket, the size of a silver dollar, which he opened and handed to her. One interior face of it was lined with a photograph of Berenice as a girl of twelve, thin, delicate, supercilious, self-contained, distant, as she was to this hour. ~ Theodore Dreiser

I have yet to see a fine photograph which is not a good document. ~ Berenice Abbott

The lens freezes time and space in what may be an optical slavery or, contrarily, the crystallization of meaning. The limits of the lens' vision are esthetically often a virtue. ~ Berenice Abbott

Pictures are wasted unless the motive power which impelled you to action is strong and stirring. ~ Berenice Abbott

I connected very much with all the work of Joan Crawford because she started as a flapper. She used to dance and sing and she was very cute. She had something that was so different from what she is at the end of her life and she started in the silent movies and then went into the talkies. ~ Berenice Bejo

As an actor, you think you have to go really far and deep and cry and yell to be good in a scene. Sometimes that's not the point. ~ Berenice Bejo

The camera is no more an instrument of preservation, the image is. ~ Berenice Abbott

And Shanghai is amazing. I'm a fan of science fiction so when you're there in the night with all the lights and all this modernity, it's like a set in a movie. ~ Berenice Marlohe

We all of us somehow caught. We born this way or that way and we don't know why. But we caught any how. I was born Berenice. You Born Franky. John Henry born John Henry. And maybe we wants to widen and bust free. But no matter what we do we still caught. Me is me and you is you and he is he. We each one of us somehow caught all by ourself. I'm caught worse than you is. Because I'm Black, because I'm colored. ~ Carson McCullers

You scientists are the worst photographers in the world and you need the best photographers in the world and I'm the one to do it. ~ Berenice Abbott

Here, you go to the supermarket and you have wipes to clean your hands before shopping. No, we don't have that in France, but we recycle. ~ Berenice Bejo

The photograph may be presented as finely and artistically as you will; but to merit serious consideration, must be directly connected with the world we live in. ~ Berenice Abbott

I spent hours on the internet looking at how glamorous actresses winked and how they would put their hand on their waist, and I was told to look at how they would walk in a room and how her body takes place of everything. ~ Berenice Bejo

I didn't decide to be a photographer; I just happened to fall into it. ~ Berenice Abbott

I'm very passionate about art, music, drawing, acting, so I'd like to have the chance to get the larger choice regarding acting. ~ Berenice Marlohe

The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice
although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

None. They should just go out and photograph and stop talking about it. That's the only way they are going to find themselves. They can't do it in their heads - they have to go out and do it in the camera and get it on film. ~ Berenice Abbott

Photography helps people to see. ~ Berenice Abbott

Imagine a world without photography, one could only imagine. ~ Berenice Abbott

I think the important decision for a photographer is to choose a subject that intensely interests him or her. ~ Berenice Abbott

Like every other means of expression, photography, if it is to be utterly honest and direct, should be related to the life of the times - the pulse of today. ~ Berenice Abbott

Of course, when you work on a character, you try to understand her. You feel that everything she does has a reason. ~ Berenice Bejo

I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else. Excitement about the subject is the voltage which pushes me over the mountain of drudgery necessary to produce the final photograph. ~ Berenice Abbott

It's very difficult in France to get access to castings when you don't have any relationships. ~ Berenice Marlohe

The more you do, the more you realize there is to do, what a vast object the metropolis is, and how the work of photographing could go on forever. ~ Berenice Abbott

Today we are confronted with reality on the vastest scale mankind has known and this puts a greater responsibility on the photographer. ~ Berenice Abbott

I know, but what is it all about? People loose and at
the same time caught. Caught and loose. All these people
and you don't know what joins them up. There's bound to
be some sort of reason and connection. Yet somehow I
can't seem to name it. I don't know."
"If you did you would be God," said Berenice. "Didn't
you know that? ~ Carson McCullers

Many audiences all over the world will answer positively from their own experience that they have seen the face of the invisible through an experience on the stage that transcended their experience in life. They will maintain that Oedipus or Berenice or Hamlet or The Three Sisters performed with beauty and with love fires the spirit and gives them a reminder that daily drabness is not necessarily all. ~ Peter Brook

Right now I'm the most famous silent movie actress in the world and I want to keep that for me. So I hope there's not going to be any other silent movies. ~ Berenice Bejo

Marlene Dietrich for the way there was something so unique about her - the way she entered into a frame and everybody looks at her and the way she winks and looks up. ~ Berenice Bejo

I'm okay. Nobody's bothering me. Everyone's very kind, and very polite. I don't feel like my whole life changed. ~ Berenice Bejo

I'm 50% Asian actually, so yes I was born in Paris but I feel more international than French so I can't talk about French women. ~ Berenice Marlohe

Photography was the medium preeminently qualified to unite art with science. Photography was born in the years which ushered in the scientific age, an offspring of both science and art. ~ Berenice Abbott

I am so fascinated with this century it will help keep me alive. I'll be there until the last minute, fighting. ~ Berenice Abbott

Maybe I'll put my iPod in two minutes before. But truly, I've listened to actors say that they loved to listen to music before a shot, and I really understand that now because it puts you in the mood and gives you energy. ~ Berenice Bejo

If a medium is representational by nature of the realistic image formed by a lens, I see no reason why we should stand on our heads to distort that function. On the contrary, we should take hold of that very quality, make use of it, and explore it to the fullest. ~ Berenice Abbott

Listen," F. Jasmine said. "What I've been trying to say is this. Doesn't it strike you as strange that I am I, and you are you? I am F. Jasmine Addams. And you are Berenice Sadie Brown. And we can look at each other, and touch each other, and stay together year in and year out in the same room. Yet always I am I, and you are you. And I can't ever be anything else but me, and you can ever be anything else but you. Have you ever thought of that? And does it seem to you strange? ~ Carson McCullers

Photography doesn't teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see. ~ Berenice Abbott

I wanted to combine science and photography in a sensible, unemotional way. Some people's ideas of scientific photography is just arty design, something pretty. That was not the idea. The idea was to interpret science sensibly, with good proportion, good balance and good lighting, so we could understand it. ~ Berenice Abbott

What to me is anathema - a corpse-like, outmoded hangover - is for photography to be a bad excuse for another medium ... Is not photography good enough in itself, that it must be made to look like something else, supposedly superior? ~ Berenice Abbott

A character is never entirely white or black, there's never entirely right or wrong. You have to realize sometimes you face something, and then you change your mind, or then you realize you were wrong. ~ Berenice Bejo

Photography is not only drawing with light, though light is the indispensable agent of its being. It is modeling or sculpturing with light, to reproduce the plastic form of natural objects. It is painting with light ... ~ Berenice Abbott

It's a once-in-a-lifetime event for all of us, something like this. ~ Berenice Bejo